OCTOBER 14, 1955

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Two international artists—Edy Legrand, the French illustrator, and the Uruguay-born woodcut artist, Antonio Fransconi—have contributed their designs and all the profits from the sale of Christmas cards with their designs to UNICEF.

UNICEF is the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. The UNICEF cards are, I think, among the most delightful that have ever been used. These cards can be bought in the bookstore on the basement floor of the U.N. Building, and I think anyone will find delightful Christmas gifts as well as the answer to their Christmas card problem by visiting this bookstore and the nearby gift shop.

UNICEF is trying this year to sell 5,000,000 cards. If it attains this goal, it would be able to provide enough powdered milk to give 450,000 boys and girls a cup of milk a day for a year. Or, with the same money it could buy vaccine to protect children against TB or buy DDT to help fight malaria which takes the lives of so many children every year in certain parts of the world.

I hope very much that a great many people will want to help the children as well as spread the knowledge of what UNICEF does by buying the cards this year.

* * *

I wonder how many of my friends have seen the reprint of a lecture delivered at a literary luncheon organized by the London Conservative Union and addressed by T.S. Eliot. The foreword is written by the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Eden and I think it is a joy, so I quote it here:

"A quarter of a century ago the Saturday Review stated, with splendid exaggeration, that the tone of English literature was such that 'the Conservatives have no need to worry about propaganda: They have but to encourage the sale of cheap editions of the national classics!'

"Now, in these pages, we find one of our foremost contemporary men of letters reminding us afresh, almost as an aside, that the Conservative tradition is also a tradition of good writing. The tenor of Mr. T.S. Eliot's own thought, no less than the quality of his style, places him well within that tradition. It was enterprising of our Conservative Political Centre, and in keeping with its highly successful approach to politics, to have cast Mr. Eliot in an unfamiliar role and now to have reproduced for the instruction and delight of a wider audience, this very stimulating lecture."

I wonder if our political parties will organize anything of this kind in the future.